Cataclysm: Bright Nights

Cataclysm: Bright Nights (BN) describes itself in its README as “a roguelike with sci-fi elements set in a post-apocalyptic world”, and adds: “Cataclysm: Bright Nights is a fork of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.” It split from Cataclysm: DDA in May 2020, at the revision “just before pockets”, and has been developed separately by its own community since. Version 0.13.0, from September 2026, is the current stable release.

How it differs from DDA

• A way to win: the game has end-game goals, where DDA is open-ended.
• Lua mods: mods can run Lua scripts, in a sandbox without file or system access.
• Bundled mod packs: since 0.13, the APK includes nine packs from the game’s mod registry, which you enable per world.
• Older foundations: BN left DDA before several of its later systems, such as pockets for containers, so the two games now play differently, and mods are written for one or the other.

Like DDA, it is a deep, turn-based game made for keyboards first; expect a learning curve on a phone.

Offline

The app declares no internet permission, so it can’t go online at all. Crashes are written to a local log. The only link to the outside is a Bug report entry in the debug menu, which opens a GitHub page in your browser with your settings filled in, and only when you choose it.

About this file

• This is the developers’ own stable release 0.13.0, the 64-bit build without the sound pack (cbn-android-x64-no-soundpack) from the project’s GitHub page. The other build is identical apart from the Otopack sounds and is about 189 megabytes larger.
• It is signed with the project’s release key, the same on every release we checked since 2021; the key and its password are kept in the project’s private build settings. A debug key with a public password in the repository signs only test builds of pull requests.
• The project also publishes nightly builds, marked as pre-releases, with the same package name and key; this site hosts stable releases only. Bright Nights isn’t on Google Play, F-Droid or IzzyOnDroid.
• The 282.8 MB file runs on 64-bit ARM phones with Android 10 or later and Vulkan 1.1. It declares four permissions: all-files access and the older storage permissions, for the Documents folder used by default, and vibration. Every release so far has the same internal version code, 1, so updates are told apart by their version name.
• Bright Nights is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence, the Magical Nights mod under CC BY-SA 4.0, and its fonts are Unifont and Terminus under their own free licences. Of the bundled mod packs, Overhaul, Otopack’s mods and Medieval Mod Reborn have no licence file in their repositories, and Overhaul’s author writes, “I (@scarf005) do not own assets of overhaul”. As in DDA, the LARWICK map font and some tree sprites from OpenGameArt have no licence stated.
• The project publishes no Android screenshots, so the picture here is the desktop collage from its README.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017).